Attacks on Pregnant Women, Hidden Messages

For any of you who check on the NAPW blog, you will notice that it is not so much a blog as an occasional commentary or notice. Today you are in for a change.

Almost every day there is something in the newspaper (yes I still actually get some of my news from things that are published with ink on newsprint) that connects to NAPW’s work. Here are two thoughts for the day.

For a long time I have been troubled by an interview posted on Youtube with one, Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist hired by the state of Kansas to go after George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who provides much needed abortion services. Families, many of whom would describe themselves as pro-life, go to his clinic for help from all over the United States. Dr. McHugh was hired as part of an effort to prevent Dr. Tiller from providing these services. In the interview, Dr. McHugh claims that there is never ever, even possibly a psychological need for an abortion.

As is often the case in the abortion debate, this interview also serves as a vehicle for other political messages and agendas. Very often that agenda includes reinforcing the mythology of government care – the idea that services and support are readily available to people -- if only they would go out and get it. So for example, Dr. McHugh asserts, in this interview that "after all, in our country, the resources for psychiatric services and psychological services are rich." Really?

An op ed in today’s New York Times addressing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for soldiers returning from Iraq reports that “Less than 40 percent of service members who get a diagnosis of P.T.S.D. receive mental health services, and only slightly more than half of recent veterans who receive treatment get adequate care. Those who seek follow-up treatment run into delays of up to 90 days, which suggests there is a serious shortage of mental health professionals available to help them.”

So if even our soldiers can’t get the psychological care they need -- it is hard to believe that pregnant women -- many of whom are poor, many of whom lack health insurance, and virtually none of whom have insurance that covers mental health services -- will find our country "rich" in psychological services.

Here is another one. Although no law in Alabama permits the prosecution of a woman who continues her pregnancy to term in spite of a drug problem, a local prosecutor has decided to make his own law. He claims that the state’s chemical endangering law – a law designed to deter and punish the creation of things like methamphetamine labs – should be judicially expanded to apply to pregnant women in relationship to the fetuses they carries. (A pregnant woman = a methamphetamine manufacturing and processing plant?) Although every leading public health and child welfare group to address this issue thinks this approach will undermine both maternal and fetal health, this prosecutor asserts that imprisoning pregnant women will somehow protect their children.

So the other day I was reading about Alabama county jails. Public experts generally agree that good nutrition is important to achieving healthy pregnancies. Turns out though that by law Alabama provides a state food allowance of only $1.75 per prisoner per day. Just to give you an idea of how little that is – I learned from Paul Krugman’s column today that the cost of a free school lunch for a poor child is $2.57. A single very low cost meal per day is $2.75—but the state of Alabama will protect its future children by imprisoning pregnant women and feeding them for an entire day on less than $1.75? I say “less than” because Alabama rewards local sheriffs by allowing them to spend even less than $1.75 per day and keeping the difference for him or herself.